The price of advice

Why don’t more of us use fee-only planners? It’s the shock of seeing a bill for $500 to $1,000, says David Stewart, a fee-only planner at Stewart & Kett in Toronto. We’re so conditioned to the notion that financial advice should be free that we faint at the notion of paying upfront for it. What we don’t realize is that we’re already paying traditional advisers for the supposedly free advice that they deliver. We pay for their advice in the form of hidden fees and skewed recommendations. An hourly paid adviser is free of those conflicts.